Stuff You Should Know - How the Scientific Method Works

Episode Date: January 14, 2015

It evolved over centuries to become the gold standard for conducting scientific inquiry. Yet many people - including some scientists - don't fully understand it. Learn about the basis of how we explore our world in this episode. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. There's Jerry, Stuff You Should Know, Mike Grinnon. It's been a while, man. I know. It's like those words just come pouring out of my mouth and it's cool.

You wake up in the middle of the night saying that and you may like slugged you in the face. Right. She's like, go back to sleep. She has to dry my brow. Yes, we pre-recorded some for December as we like to do to take a little time off at the end of the year and not explain things for a few weeks in our real lives. It's nice. Like people ask me things like...

What happened to that stick of butter? Yeah, I don't know. Don't ask. Don't even ask me. I could tell you. But I'm not gonna. Exactly. That's how it goes in my house.

Find your own butter. Right. December was Find Your Own Butter Month. Yeah. That's a good one. That should be a t-shirt. Yeah. Stuff You Should Know, Find Your Own Butter.

Or December is Find Your Own Butter Month. Yeah, that's right. Maybe a stick of butter or some garland on it. Yeah, I like that. So it's good to see you again, man. Good to be back in here. Yeah, it is nice to be back. As much as the break was great, I'm happy to be explaining things again.

Well, that's good, because if we got in here and you're like, I can't do this, I can't do it again. We'd be in trouble. Yeah. Yeah. So I'm glad we're all feeling good. Jerry, you feeling good? Jerry's got two thumbs up in a big, goofy smile.

Wow. Two of her three thumbs. She looks like Bob from that male enhancement pill ad. Oh, see the guy, the old man that's like super buff? I would call him old, he was middle aged. He looked like kind of a Bob Dobbs typey dude. I think that's kind of who he was modeled after. See the guy that's super muscly now?

I'm thinking of someone different, I think. Are you thinking of Jack LaLaine? No, no, no, no. Just there's some ad, there's some old man that looks like really creepy because from the neck down. Because he's super like buff? He looks like a 25 year old. No, remember there was like a male enhancement pill and I'm making air quotes here.

For erectile dysfunction. Oh, well, there go the air quotes. But yes. And it was like in the early 2000s, I think. Maybe late 90s, but I think early 2000s and these ads were everywhere and there was Bob and like all these great things happened to him because he started taking this pill. I can't remember the name of the pill. But the company like got into a lot of trouble because it was basically like a subscription

service and like you gave him your credit card and you got this free trial. But then they started sending it to you and it was like next to impossible to cut off service. Interesting. They were like, no, we want your maleness to be enhanced. So you've seen these ads. Yeah, I was going to start asking questions, but why bother? I will find it on YouTube.

I'll be like, oh, Bob. Yeah, you will. You'll go, oh, I want to come back in and record an insert. Right. The guy that's on the back of all those pill bottles in my bathroom. So Chuck. Yes. I don't even remember how we got.

Oh, yeah. Jerry did that. That was Jerry's fault. But you remember we did the Enlightenment episode? Yeah. Okay. We talked a lot about how there's this kind of tug-of-war over the human psyche between rationalism and mysticism, I guess you could put it.

Yeah. Well, I feel like we're talking today about the scientific method. Yeah. Great idea, by the way. Thank you very much. It's been a long time coming because I realized like I don't understand it as fully as I don't understand science. I don't understand the scientific method because it's pretty cut and dry and it's beautiful

and elegant and simple. But then you just take this thing and it came out of the birth of rationalism and when you place it into the world and make it function, there's a lot of implications. Is it being used properly? Is it being used responsibly? Are we putting what constitutes faith into that? It just raises all this other stuff and it made me realize like I don't understand science as much as I want to.

So researching this, it was awesome. Yeah. And this is a cool episode, I think, because not only are we going to talk about the scientific method but we're going to talk about just science, like what is science in general and some of the rock stars along the way who really laid out the path remarkably many, many years ago. Right. Like coming up with these amazing discoveries that still hold their feet to the fire for

a lot of this stuff. And because if you come upon a universal truth, it is what it is, like you got to be the person who discovered it because you saw it, you realized it a certain way, but ultimately it was there already. Yeah, like Newton. I mean, we'll talk about all this stuff, but it's not like now we're like, oh, Newton, most of what he said was wrong, but that's understandable because it was a long time ago. His stuff holds up really, really well.

I was wondering if he on his deathbed was just like, oh man, I contributed so much to humanity. It's mind-boggling. But I couldn't enhance my malehood. Well, Bob hadn't come along yet. So Chuck, let's just quit stalling and talk about science. Like what is science? Well, I hate the old elementary school defined as, but it's a pretty good place to start

here to get a base definition of science. Yeah, old William Harris did a great job with this. Yes. William Harris did a great job. Yeah, he did. Science, the intellectual and practical activity encompassing the structure and behavior of the physical and natural world through observation and experimentation. Boom.

End of podcast. So the first part of that is science is practical. And it is, you know, they make a good, he makes Bill Harris makes a great point in here. It's not just stuff you do in a lab and it's not just for scientists. It is all about being hands-on and active and it's all about discovery and asking questions about, I mean, that's how everything is ultimately solved is by someone looking at something and having a question about it. Exactly.

And then the scientific method comes in when you say, and this is how you properly get to that answer. Exactly. And he makes another good point, too, that the idea that there is a method, a scientific method, makes it seem like it's secreted away among the fraternity of scientists. And like you said, anybody can use it. It's just kind of part of being a curious human. It's not that anyone can use it.

Everyone does use it. Nice. You just might not even know that you're using it. Like if you, I mean, one of the examples these later is if like your car overheats. When you figure it out why and fix it, that's the scientific method. Right. Playing out. And reasoning.

Yeah. Okay. And deduction and induction. Right. Man. There's so much to talk about. Okay. So let's talk about that definition that you had.

So the first part is that science is, it's a practical activity. So science is practical, right? Yeah. It's this, the basis of the whole thing is discovery, right? You see something, you see birds in flight and you say, where are those birds going? And if you just went and laid down on the ground and went to sleep after that, then you're not, you're not carrying out science. But if you went, I want to find out where those birds are going and you follow them

and you start taking notes, that's, that is the basis of science is discovery. Yeah. And that's the observational part as well. Sometimes you're using a microscope or a telescope. Sometimes you're using your eyeballs, but no matter what your tool is, you're going to be watching something and recording what's called data or data, depending on, I don't know, what kind of person you are. Yeah.

What do you say? I think I say both. I think I say data. Data. Yeah. I don't think I've, I don't think I say data, data. I say data. Data.

Yeah. All right. We'll go with data. You say both. I feel like it just comes out of my mouth one way or the other and I don't really think about it. I think that's like being ambidextrous. Yeah.

Yeah. I'm a data status. All right. So once you are observing this data, well, there are a couple of kinds. There's quantitative data, which are numbers, like, you know, your body temperature is 98.6, although I think that's changed slightly now, hadn't it? Yeah. Yeah.

There used to be like, if you were a human being, your body temperature is 98.6 and then you're always like, no, there's a little more variation than that. Yeah. So just numerical representation is quantitative, whereas qualitative is behavioral, like I'm going to watch that bird eat and poop for the next week. Right. Or what happens if I, what will the slug do if I put a bunch of salt on it? You know?

Don't do that. No. You really should not do that. No. That's awful. But the reaction of the slug is gathering qualitative data. And depending on who you talk to, there isn't qualitative data in science that it should all just be quantitative because, yeah, because quantitative data is reproducible.

Qualitative data is, it's not necessarily reproducible. You can observe the same phenomenon, but you're not necessarily controlling it. Okay. Well, I guess I get that, but I agree with Bill here in that they are both, they go hand in hand. Yeah. And neither one is more important than the other. You need to have both.

Well, a lot of people do. And we'll talk more about it later because without the idea that qualitative data is acceptable and scientific, you don't have the social sciences. Like they don't exist. Yeah. That's a good point. You know? But yes, we have quantitative data and qualitative data.

I agree with you. They're both useful. Okay. It is an intellectual pursuit. So you can make observations on data all day long, but until you bring reason, in this case, inductive reasoning, which is driving a generalization based on your observations, then it's just data sitting there on a piece of paper. Like it's supposed to lead you somewhere.

Right. Exactly. And so we should talk about inductive and deductive reasoning in it, depending again, it's really weird. One of the things I came across is that there's not a universal agreement on how science is carried out. Like I saw some places where there's like, there's no place for inductive reasoning in science.

Then other places are saying, well, you have to have science using inductive reasoning. Everybody seems to agree that deductive reasoning is the basis of science, but that you also have to have inductive. So deductive is basically taking a big broad generalization and saying that it applies to something specific. More specific. Yes. Yeah.

Inductive is the opposite. Say, I've noticed these different data points and that means that this broad generalization is true. Right. So you go from specific, small observations to a broad generalization. And the reason that a lot of people say, well, inductive reasoning doesn't have any place in science is because you're saying those birds over there are all brown. Therefore, all birds of that type are brown.

So I haven't seen every single bird of that type in the world. I'm saying that all those birds are brown and a lot of people say, there's no place for that in science. Well, if you want to go out and prove that then, that's your business. You can't just say that and be like, and I'm done. Right. Exactly. I guess you could, but you won't be much of a scientist.

Right. But you can use it to formulate hypotheses. Sure. Right. So you can say, I've generated all these data points. I'm going to put them together and see if this broad generalization is true. Right. Okay.

So there is a place for inductive reasoning science, but everybody says deductive reasoning is the basis of science. Well, Bill Harris does, he offers a great example for inductive reasoning with Edwin Hubble of the Hubble telescope. He was looking through the Hooker telescope at the time at California's Mount Wilson. Is that the one from Rebel without a cause? No. It's from Griffith Park Observatory, which has been redesigned and is really cool now.

Is it? Yeah. I mean, it was kind of cool before, but it was definitely like sort of the base museum that time forgot. Oh, really? So they've updated it. I'll bet that was cool though in its own way. Yeah.

It was neat. I used to live near there. So it was kind of... But that's like the famous one, at least in the movies. Yeah. It's where they have the big knife fight. Yeah. And there's this James Dean statue there too.

Oh, I didn't know. Like a bust. So, yes, Edwin Hubble, he's at Mount Wilson and he's looking through the Hooker telescope, which was the biggest one. And at the time, everyone said, the Milky Way galaxy is it. That's what we've got going on. Yeah. Did you know this?

Yeah, I knew that. Because we're talking 1919. Yeah. Not that long ago. Did not realize this. And he started looking through this telescope and said, you know what, these nebula that everyone says are part of our galaxy look to me like they're beyond our galaxy. Not only that, they look like they're moving away from us.

So he made this, through inductive reasoning, made this observation that, you know what, I think there are many, many galaxies out there and not only that, I think they are expanding. Yeah. And through technological advancement with telescopes over the years, scientists, you know, it proved to be true. Yeah. Pretty cool.

So this is a really good example of him saying, like, I've made some observations and now I'm going to say this broad generalization. Yeah. Right? So these galaxies appear to be moving away from another. So the whole universe is expanding. Right? That's inductive reasoning.

Yeah. It's a pretty brave thing, especially back then because you're really putting your reputation at stake. It really is. You know? So what Hubble did was what we've come to see as science. He made some observations. He came up with a hypothesis and then it was tested later on.

It's not, you don't necessarily, as a scientist, you're a part of a larger collective of scientists. Yes. Right? And every scientist needs one another. It's why there's journals and conferences and things like that to share information, right? Yeah. And to party.

Right. And to party. And Hubble came up with his own observations and rather than just experimenting, experimenting, himself, which I'm sure you continue to do, he created this basis of work that he probably realized is going to survive him. Yeah. Yeah. Right?

And then later on, scientists came down the road and they tested his hypothesis. And they found it was correct. And so his hypothesis became a theory. It eventually became part of the basis of the Big Bang Theory that the universe started as a huge explosion and it's expanding still because it exploded at one point, right? Yeah. And they did that by carrying out other tests. Or experiments.

Exactly. Yeah. So this is how science works. Like some guy back in 1990, makes some observations in California. In 1925, he proposes this big broad generalization and over the next like ensuing half a century, more and more scientists all around the world start testing his hypothesis and find it to be true. So it becomes a theory.

Yeah. Well, well, let's finish up here with science. The last part of the definition is that it's systematic and it's methodical and it requires testing and experiments and it requires those experiments and tests to be repeated and verified. And it's a system, it's a way of working things out. It's a way of working. Yeah. And that is the scientific method, basically.

Yeah. You have your idea, you pose a question, you theorize or you put a hypothesis out there and then you go about trying to either prove it or disprove it. Yeah, exactly. And then the way that you go about proving or disproving it, that's the scientific method. Everything else is just scientific inquiry. The way you go about the standardized way of going about scientific inquiry is the scientific method.

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Hypotheses and theories. That's tough to say together. No, you did it. One thing that really chafes my hide is, uh, when you hear poopers of whatever scientific theory say, well, it's just a theory, and you, where was this thing that you found that poo pooed that? Do you remember what website that was? No.

No. Although I do want to give a shout out now that you mentioned it to Explorables. It's like an online university, basically, of free courses. And there is one on scientific reasoning that is just amazing. It's like a huge rabbit hole. You go down, you start clicking on the embedded links and you end up like understanding all sorts of stuff. So go check that one out.

If you like understanding stuff. Right. So that's one of the things that bug me if someone says it's just a theory, and this does a great job of kind of throwing that out the window, um, because it's basically mixing up the two definitions of theory. Yeah, there's like a colloquial definition that people use every day that doesn't really have much to do with the scientific use of it. Like I got a theory that Jerry and I would one hour bathroom breaks every day is really

playing words with friends in the lobby. I think your theory is correct. So that's a theory in the colloquial meaning. Right. As far as science goes, a theory is not just something you postulate. Say, if this may or may not be true, a theory is beyond the hypothesis and it's something that is strongly supported in many different ways and all, there's all kinds of evidence to support something that eventually becomes a theory.

Right. So, um, what you, your theory about Jerry's bathroom breaks in the scientific world would be a hypothesis. What? Fact. Yeah. Well, it'd be a scientific law. Yeah.

But it ultimately would begin as a hypothesis, a hunch based on intuition, based on the data you've collected, observations, that kind of stuff where like, you know, you've seen that Jerry goes to the bathroom for like an hour to stretch frequently when she comes back. She's, um, finishing up a game of words with friends. Sure. Uh, you've heard that she's been spotted in the lobby during these times. Yeah.

So your hypothesis is that while she is gone for these hour long bathroom breaks, she's actually down the lobby playing words with friends. Right. Yeah. And that's a huge observation and logic. Right. So let's say that you decided to set up an experiment and you experimented and you went and you found Jerry playing words with friends five different times and you told me about

it. Right. And I was like, I'm going to run that same experiment exactly the way you did. Yeah. Right. I would test that same hypothesis. If I found the same results to be true, then what you would have come up with, your hypothesis would move to basically a theory that is this widely accepted thing, this explanation that

Jerry is not actually in the bathroom. She's downstairs playing with friends. It'd be the Jerry bathroom break theory. That's right. And then if it turns out that you find that Jerry spending an hour a day pretending to be in the bathroom, but actually being downstairs playing words with friends, if the universe couldn't exist without her doing that every day, you would have a scientific law. That's right.

Yeah. I think that was a good example you came up with. That's a great example as it turns out. I guess the point here is when you hear someone say in an argument, well, that's just a theory, just punch them in the head and then tell them what we just said about the bathroom breaks and they'll say, who's Jerry? Or just queue up that whole bit and stand outside of their window wearing a trench coat and holding a boombox over your head with this smug look on your face.

All right. So should we go back in the old wayback machine a little bit and just talk a little bit about how the scientific method came to be? Yes. Man, this thing, what are you running this on these days? What do you mean? It's a straight kerosene. The fumes in here are killing me.

Sorry about that. I'm trying to go green, you know. Kerosene is not green. Diesel, maybe? I'm choking. Biodiesel. How about that? Okay.

The wayback machine will run French fry grease. That would be fine. All right. I'll get to work on that. I could handle this. So you tease this with the Renaissance and the reason the Renaissance was so awesome and necessary was because of something else we've talked about, which was the Dark Ages. Which remember, that's a rationalist's disparaging term for this era.

That's right. But I think sort of rightfully so. Because right before the Dark Ages until about a century after, there was not much advancement at all in the realm of scientific advancement. No, it's true. It's hard to argue with that. And the reason why is, again, science wasn't really born yet. And there is a huge struggle between rationalism and mysticism.

And ultimately, we're living in the age of rationalism now. Yeah. And we should point out too that this was mainly in Europe. Over in the Islamic world, as I think we had a listener mail point out, there were a lot of advancements being made. Just sort of flying under the European radar at the time because some say the Catholic Church kind of kept science under its thumb for a while. Yeah.

Well, that's a pretty big threat. Yeah. Said, you know, you can't do this stuff. You can't experiment like this. And don't ask these questions. Right. Because here are your answers. Yeah.

But eventually, the Renaissance came about in the 12th century and people woke up and saw some of the work in the Islamic world and said, you know what? Maybe let's start reading up on Aristotle and Ptolemy and Euclid once again. Yeah. They're like, we forgot about these guys. Yeah. I mean, it literally kind of vanished for a while. It did.

From the West. Yes. Fortunately, it was still around, you know, in its home places. But yes, in the West, they were lost. The Roman stuff was almost entirely lost because it was being suppressed by the locals. And I think the Greek knowledge was completely vanished. Yes. Somehow.

But there was some, we got another listener mail after the Enlightenment one. They said that it was an Islamic scholar who was the one who translated Aristotle into Latin or something like that. And that without this guy, like the West wouldn't have had much to start with. Because that's where that birth of rationalism came from was this rediscovery of Greek and Roman classical thought. And this was the basis of scientific inquiry of rationalism of saying like, okay, there's set rules to things and we need to discover these rules and how the principles of how

the universe works. Like, there has to be principles and we need to find this in a rational, methodical way. And right out of the gate, Europe said, oh, okay, well, whatever you say is right then, Aristotle. Right. We're used to just believing everything without questioning it. And luckily, Albert Magnus, I think, is who it was. Albertus.

Was it Albertus Magnus? Yeah. It was Roger Bacon who said, no, it was Bacon. Roger Bacon, who just has this great name, Raj Bacon. The Bacon brothers? Yeah. Francis and Roger. Right.

Well, they weren't brothers though. But were they related at all? You know, I look that up and I don't think people know either way. I don't think there's any proof, but a lot of people think because of their names and the way things went back then that they may very well have been rated. Yeah. And I mean, they were separated by 300 years or so years. So Roger was a monk, so he would not have had children.

So if they were related. Oh, it's an excellent point. It wasn't necessarily through his line. Gotcha. You know. Yeah. It could have been a nephew or something. Yeah.

Or his brother, Kevin, might have had the line that matched. So Roger was the one who said, everybody stop. Just because Aristotle wrote something doesn't mean his fact, especially when we find contradictions to it. Yeah. And Aristotle is not automatically right, and this is a huge advancement. Yeah. And Albertus Magnus was the one, I believe, who said, you know, this thing called revealed

truth, which is basically God says this instead of a truth found by experimenting is maybe we should experiment instead and not take this revealed truth as the truth. Right. And we mentioned in that enlightenment episode as well about scholasticism, about using scientific inquiry to explain theology, which was, you know, you're still working from a theological standpoint, but you're starting to use scientific inquiry and the idea that you shouldn't just accept things as truth. That was, again, a huge, huge breakthrough.

Yeah. Francis Bacon, the other Bacon brother, he's one of the heroes of the story. Yeah. He was an attorney and philosopher and possibly Shakespeare. Oh, really? I never heard that. No. Yeah.

Interesting. So what do you mean? Like wrote those under the pseudonym? Yeah. Huh. And the Shakespeare sister was the other theory, too, right? It was a woman. I've heard that.

Yeah. And she couldn't, like, you know, women couldn't be the playwright, so her dumb brother, William, that's a good, was it a brother? I think that was one of the theories. Huh. This is a good Smith song, too. Shakespeare sister, was that the name of it? Yeah.

I think it was. Was it? Maybe. So anyway, he was a philosopher and a lawyer, and he said, you know what, the Baconian method basically became the scientific method. Yeah. He was the first dude who really said, this is how the steps that you should take to investigate science.

Right. There has to be a framework. And the point of this, that we take this so for granted now, because it's so intuitively and on its face, right, as far as scientific inquiry goes, but this is an enormous breakthrough to say, follow this step, these steps, this framework. And if everybody who carries out science follows the same framework, then science will be universal and interchangeable, and anyone in the world, and not just now, but anytime, will be able to carry out the same experiment and will be able to verify or disprove it.

And that is amazing that that happened. That's why Francis Bacon is one of the heroes of the story, and he didn't come up with this entirely on his own, but he was the one who said, this is what we're going to do. I'm going to give it a name. I'm going to spell it out, and from now on, you can call me the dad of the scientific method. Yeah, and that's why Newton was such a rock star, because he's so rigorously stuck to

the scientific method that all these centuries later, his systems of laws, they have stood the test of time. And I think it's a good point to bring up, too, that the collaboration of scientists is really the hallmark of advancement and moving forward. It's not working in a vacuum. It's sharing your ideas and working with one another, and the whole little sidebar here on cell theory, I thought was pretty cool, which was when science quit, or not quit, but started looking at small things instead of looking at the universe around them and

at the stars and said, basically, through the advancement of lens grinding, Antonio van Lievenhoek specifically, a Dutch tradesman, was pretty good at making simple microscopes, and all of a sudden, contemporaries like Robert Hooke said, let's start looking at tiny things, because therein might lie the answer to many, many things, and they're right. He discovered cells by looking at cork through an early microscope. So in this story, science is hastened by technological advancement, lens grinding, to make microscopes, and then this new technology is used to further science, right?

Yeah, it's like mutual inspiration between Lievenhoek and Hooke. Lievenhoek. Yeah, it was neat. So Lievenhoek heard about Lievenhoek's microscopes, got his hands on one, or a microscope, looked at them, the cork, and said, oh, there's such a thing as cells. Lievenhoek said, oh, that's pretty neat, let me try. And he said, oh, there's such a thing as quote, little animals, which we call protozoan bacteria. And one of the royal societies, after Lievenhoek presented his findings, turned back to Hooke

and said, hey, Hooke, we know you're pretty handy with the microscope. Can you confirm Lievenhoek's findings? Are there little animals? Hooke said, there are indeed. I can see them with my microscope. That's right. And that inspired a German botanist named Matthias Schleiden to look at a lot of plants. And he was the first guy to say, you know what?

Plants are composed of cells, and he was having dinner one night with his zoologist buddy. Yeah, and this is about 100 years later. Yeah, Theodore Schwan, and said, you know what, dude, order the wine and order the steak. Trust me, because this place is fantastic. And also, plants are made of cells. Don't tell anyone. And he went, you know what, dude? I have been investigating animals with microscopes, and they're made of cells, too.

And so they figured out at this dinner that everything is made of cells. All living things are made of cells. Boom. So this is huge, this is a big advancement, right, that we're hitting upon right now. But it laid the further foundation, right? So initial scientific inquiry led to further scientific inquiry, and further scientific conclusions and generalizations, all living things are made of cells. And then it was extrapolated elsewhere, right?

Yeah, like 20 years later, Rudolph Virchow said, you know what, not only is everything made of living cells, but they all come from pre-existing cells, which was a huge deal at the time, because people believed in spontaneous generation at the time. Like if you left some wheat seed in a sweaty shirt, it would spawn mice, I think, was one of them. Gross. There's a lot of weird ones. Press basil between some bricks, and you'll get a scorpion was one.

Like they were really out there. Yeah, well, the one that is, well, not true, but the one that you could actually see was rotten meat would eventually spawn maggots. Right. How did they possibly get there? Yeah, spontaneous generation, but... That's the obvious explanation. And if you think about it, they're working from Occam's razor.

And Occam's razor says the simplest explanation is usually the right one. All other things given. Well, the thing is, is spontaneous generation has never been shown to be possible. Right. So if we look at the cell thing over here, let's investigate that. So this, what was the guy's name, Virchow? Yes. He's saying, okay, well, wait a minute, I've got this cell theory I'm working on that's

been around for a couple of decades. Cell hypothesis, probably. Cell hypothesis at the nice catch. Don't feel bad, though, because this article that you sent said that scientists today like still confuse those terms just colloquially. And the House of Works article makes a good point in saying that science and everything that has to do with it in the scientific method is very fluid and open to interpretation and experimentation, obviously.

But so he says, okay, this cell hypothesis, this is a pretty good explanation for what we now call spontaneous generation. He didn't do anything about it. He just put it out there. And then along comes Louis Pasteur, who does do something about it. He figures out a great experiment to try to disprove spontaneous generation. Yeah, it's pretty simple, too. He basically took a broth, put equal amounts in two different beakers.

One had a straight neck and one had an S-shaped neck. He boiled it just to make sure everything in it was killed and then just let it sit there in the same conditions open to the world or open to the room, like it wasn't corked, in other words. And he noticed that the one with the straight neck eventually became cloudy and discolored, meaning there was some junk growing in there, and the one in the S-shaped neck did not do anything. It remained the same.

Right. So it led him to think, what? Well, he thought that germs, that there was such thing as germs, which leave and hook and hook had already shown, and that in the S-shaped flask, they had gotten trapped in the neck, in the open neck, they had been able to just enter unobstructed and had generated there. The reason that the S-shaped flask was still sterile was because there is no such thing as spontaneous generation.

If there were, then no S-shaped neck would impede anything like that. And boom, there you have it. So he disproved that spontaneous generation is a thing, right? That's right. The scientific method. Exactly. Here's the leap that a lot of people make. Scientists included that really is a great disservice to science.

He didn't prove cell theory. Right. What he did was take that cell hypothesis and present some really persuasive evidence that it's probably right. Yeah, but like this article you sent points out, disproving something is just as important as proving something. So here's the thing. What's the most you can hope for as science is disproving?

With science, unless you're talking about math, with science, there's no such thing as proof. A theory, even a law, a universal law, still has the potential for being undermined by one single experiment, one single observation. And therefore, there is no real ultimate proof in science. There's just theories and support for theories, and then ultimately, laws aim further and further support for laws. Right.

But they're not proven. What science does, ultimately, is disprove things or lend support for existing theories, or existing interpretations of why things happen the way they do. And that's what Pasteur did. So if you look at the experiment, he disproved spontaneous generation, but he lent support to the cell theory, and probably with his experiment, it went from the cell hypothesis to the cell theory because it was just so persuasive. And that's what a theory is.

It means that a lot of people out there who are reasonable say this explanation is probably the right one. Yeah, it's predictive. If you do it over and over, you're probably going to get the same result. Right. But that's not to say that Pasteur showed that if you do this a million and one times, that the S-shaped flask won't turn cloudy. He didn't prove that.

You can't prove that, which is, again, science can disprove and lend support. You can't prove. Very good point. So right after this message break, we're going to get into the actual steps of the scientific method. For two decades, Chris Harrison saw it all, and now he's sharing the things he can't unsee. I'm looking forward to getting this off my shoulders and repairing this, moving forward,

and letting everybody care for me. What does Chris Harrison have to say now? You're going to want to find out. I have not spoken publicly for two years about this, and I have a lot of thoughts. I think about this every day. Truly, every day of my life, I think about this and what I want to say. Welcome to the most dramatic podcast ever with Chris Harrison on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay. I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help.

This I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep.

We know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Uh-huh. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now.

And so tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right, dude, I guess at long last we're there. Uh, like you mentioned before, the scientific method is fluid and it's not like when you get your science degree, they hand you a little laminated card like the Miranda rights that cops carry that, you know, list out all the different steps you have to take.

But generally- Oh, maybe. Yeah. I would. We should carry those around. All right. We should make little wallet cards of the scientific method just to carry stuff you should know about going on it.

Oh, yeah. We'll make a million bucks. We could brand them and sell them. Yeah. Uh, generally speaking though, it follows these steps. Uh, the first thing you do, like we mentioned earlier, is you observe something. You ask a question, uh, next, like Darwin was known, I think when we did our podcast on him to, he would spend like a week on three square feet of ground on his property.

Oh, it was like even longer than that. Remember? Yeah. Remember? It was, wasn't it? He said that he didn't, he wasn't going to mow his lawn for like three years because he wanted to see what, what happened. Yeah.

So he, he's the ultimate in qualitative data of just observing, writing things down and asking questions. And the reason you ask your question is so you can narrow something down, uh, like the, I think the example they use in here is on Galapagos, like the beaks of, uh, what bird was it? Finches? Yeah. The Finch bird, you notice a bunch of different beaks.

So he finally posed a question like, uh, you know, I think these beaks are different for a very specific reason. Right. And I am defined out why. Yes. He said, what caused the diversification of Finches on Galapagos? Oh, you should have done that with an accent. Well, yeah, he would have had a British accent, huh?

Yeah. Huh. Unless he was pretending to be someone else. I always think of him as like, um, sounding like Hemingway or something. Oh yeah. Yeah. Drunk and violent. Kind of.

But he wasn't. He was like the opposite of that. Yeah. Well, I saw that, the movie, uh, saw a picture of his voice as, uh, the dude that played him who I can't remember right now. Ed Norton. No. I finally saw Birdman though.

Did you see that? Hmm. Yeah. Yeah. Great movie. Um, I disagree. Oh, you didn't like it? No.

What? Wow. That surprises me. Um, we'll get into that off here. So, uh, sorry, you just threw me with that. Make an observation. Yes. He's on Galapagos and he's like, what the heck's with all these different Finches?

Right. It's one small island. Why would there be different species of Finch? So ask the question. And, and why are they all seeming to survive and coexist so well? What's, what make, yeah, then he leads to the question. What's making all of these species of Finch is so diverse? Right.

Or Bill Harris uses, um, a pretty good example that's something everyone can understand. Like what car body shape is the best for air resistance? Like one that's shaped like a box or one that's shaped like aerodynamic like a bird. Right. So you set out in the next step, uh, you formulate your hypothesis, uh, based on your, you know, for knowledge and maybe observations like, so you know what, I think that a car shaped like a bird is probably more aerodynamic than one shaped like a box. Yeah.

If you're thinking, if you're the type of person who's sitting around asking questions about aerodynamics, you probably already have some sort of sense that a box is less aerodynamic than a bird. That's right. Boxes rarely fly. Unless they're carried by one of those delightful Amazon delivery drones. They don't have those yet, right? They're not going to do that.

Are they? There's like a pizza delivery drone service, man, I think where you have, no, is a pizza or grilled cheese in New York and you go stand on an X after you order and it like comes and drops it. That is the dumbest thing I've ever heard and I can't wait to do it. Oh, but they're making a lot of money. That's pretty funny. Yeah, we can't get food to the homeless somehow.

Exactly. We can drop a grilled cheese on someone's head. Right. They're like, you homeless guy, get off of that X. Exactly. All right, so your hypothesis, I don't think we ever mentioned, is typically represented as an if then statement. Yeah.

If you're doing good science. Yeah. Like if the car's profile, well, the example he uses, if the body's profile related to the amount of air it produces, which is the more general statement. Yeah. That's like based on a theory. Yeah. And it's going to get more specific than the car design like the body of a bird will be

more aerodynamic than one like a box. So that's inductive reasoning, starting with the broad statement and going to something narrow. And it's if then at the same time. Yeah. And now you have a test. You have a question that can be answered. You can figure out a way to answer it.

Yeah. And that too, this is pretty important that your hypothesis, if it's formulated correctly, means that it's testable and it's falsifiable. Which are often one in the same. True. You know? Yeah. And that's again, we go to the people who say that their soft sciences aren't real science.

They're pseudo science because a lot of the data that they come up with, a lot of the hypotheses they come up with, aren't falsifiable. They're not testable. Right. Yeah. It's a thing. It's an issue. It's a thing.

So next up in the steps, you're going to experiment. And when you experiment, you can't just go in there willy-nilly and do whatever you want. You have to set up specific conditions and they must be controlled. That's the key. Yeah. And you want everything that's supposed to be identical needs to be identical. So basically you have two variables at least. You have an independent variable.

Yes. And you have a dependent variable. And if you're talking about car shape, that is the independent variable in this study. Yeah. That's the one that's manipulated. Exactly. Yeah. It's the one you're controlling.

The independent variable is the one you, the researcher, is controlling. So in this case, you're controlling the shape of the car. You have yourself a bird-shaped car and you have yourself a box-shaped car. So the shape of the car changed because you made it change. Now when you blast a bunch of air over it during your experiment, what you're measuring is the dependent variable. So you're measuring what happens based on the change that you made. That's right.

And you want to study one single variable at a time, basically. Yeah. Don't get fancy. Just do good science, step-by-step methodical. You also have to have your control group in any experiment and an experimental group. The control group is what's going to allow you to compare the test results to that baseline measurement. Yeah.

And you need that baseline measurement. So like past year. So you know it's not just like chance, basically. Exactly. Like if past year had just done the S-shaped neck and nothing happened, he wouldn't have necessarily been able to say that he was right, even though he was right. He needed that control, which was the open flask. Right.

So with the cars, you need two cars, like you said, one bird-shaped and one box-shaped. Right. Or maybe in this case, since the bird-shaped and the box-shaped both show up in the hypothesis, you'd need a third egg-shaped one or something like that. I bet that would be pretty streamlined. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

But the key though is all of those variables have to be, all the other variables have to be the same. Like you have to have them, they have to be the same weight, they have to be painted the same, the tires, everything, the windows. One can't have an antenna and the other not, they've got to be identical other than the one variable. Right. The independent variable, that's the one you want different, everything else you want

the same, or else it's possible that, oh, well this one had bigger tires, so that actually made it more aerodynamic. Yeah. And you're just doing yourself a favor by doing all that stuff. Yeah. You know, you want to rule out everything else but that one variable. After that, you want to analyze your data so you can draw your conclusion. And sometimes it's kind of straightforward and easy, sometimes it takes a lot of work

and a lot of various tools to draw it out. Let's say you're just blasting a car in a wind tunnel, you're measuring the wind resistance using certain awesome instruments and that kind of stuff and you're taking that data and then afterward you're going to analyze, you're going to compare the data that you gathered from the bird shaped car, the box shaped car, and then the control, the egg shaped car. Right. You're going to compare them and you're going to say, well, the wind resistance was less

for the bird shaped car than the box shaped car, which means that my hypothesis was correct. Right. And here are all the data points, whereas Louis Pasteur could just say, look at the beakers. Exactly. Don't be an idiot. Yeah. I'm a scientist.

That one's got gross stuff. You can see it. Right. But the other thing about science too, Chuck, ideally is let's say that egg shaped one turned out the control group turned out to have better wind resistance than anything. Well, just by virtue of carrying out this experiment correctly, you would have stumbled upon an even better aerodynamic design and you would have come up with that little egg shaped Mercedes SUV.

Yeah. That was so huge just like 10 years ago. It was a Mercedes egg coming to a store near you. So that's a big, big part of the scientific method is carrying out an experiment controlling the variables, analyzing the data, and then there's a step that he missed that is very rarely part of a scientific method list that is to share your data. Oh, sure. And this is a huge problem with science right now.

Yeah. That article you sent was really eye-opening. Scientific research has changed the world. Now it needs to change itself. Yeah. It's an economist article. It's up on the Internet. Yeah.

It was kind of scary that it's, I mean, here's some of the data he points out is one rule of thumb among biotech venture capitalists is about half, 50% of published research can't even be replicated. And a biotech firm, Amgen, found that they could reproduce only six of their 53 landmark studies in cancer research. Right. So you can't repeat these things. It's like everyone's fighting for dollars in fame, maybe not fame, but to some are career

advancement such that they're kind of not doing that final step any longer. No. And it's not necessarily just them. It's the other scientists aren't going back and saying, well, let me see if your results are reproducible. People are just taking it on faith. We need another Roger Bacon to come along and be like, dude, we can't just blindly accept that one person carried out this one study and then just go do clinical trials on it

without anybody reproducing it to see if the results can be verified independently. Yeah. Because, and this is a good time to mention bias. There is such a thing as bias and it still happens. A scientist is usually out to prove something or disprove something that they want a specific result, like even if you're super open minded, you're probably hoping to disprove or prove something one way or the other and your confirmation bias might, you know, even if you don't think you're doing it, you might nudge out some results that don't support your hypothesis.

Right. And so you won't make it into that awesome journal, which this author points out that journals need to start putting in what he calls uninteresting results in experiments. Right. Or like the stuff that's not sexy. Right. Or studies that failed to show that their hypothesis was correct. Yeah.

Stuff is disproved. Those things still need to, well, not even disprove, well, yeah, I guess it is disproved. But yes, like the guy set out to say like a red balloon uses less helium than a silver balloon. Right. But no, they use the same amount of helium. Well, if that study gets published and put out there into the scientific literature on helium and balloons, then it's going to prevent some other scientists down the road from wasting

time, money and helium, which as you'll remember is an increasingly needed commodity, by carrying out the same experiment. Whether the results are positive or negative or what, the study is meant to be shared. And that's the point of the scientific method is to reduce bias. Right. And if you follow it all the way through, ideally, and do all of the steps, including share your research, whether it's happy or sad, then science benefits, the world benefits. And by not doing that, the world does not benefit.

Yeah. He points out that these days only 14% of published papers are quote unquote negative results. And it used to be like 30% or more. And he says, because a lot of it has to do with this sort of getting in these journals and you're the rock star scientist and this study is super sexy, like if they kind of quit going that route and made it what it should be, then research dollars would be better spent and people could, he said the peer reviewed thing isn't even all it's cracked

up to be. I know that he mentioned a study from a medical journal that gave a bunch of peer reviewers some stuff with deliberate errors inserted into the research, into the studies. And even when they were told that they were being tested to find this, they still missed a lot of it. So yeah, science used to kind of reevaluate the way it's carrying out science is not science. The problem isn't science itself. The problem isn't the scientific method.

It's the way that it's being used or not followed through. And a lot of it has to do with academia and the people funding science. Yeah, and he said these days there's up 7 million researchers and back in the day even in like the 1950s there were like a few thousand maybe. So there's just a lot of career competition. He calls it careerism. And so you fake a result or two or you just nudge out some results that don't support your hypothesis.

You want the bigger paycheck or the fame or notoriety and all of a sudden science is not science. It's pseudoscience. Exactly. And speaking of pseudoscience, I think we've reached the point where we should talk about the limitations of the scientific method because it does have its limits, right? Like the way that the scientific method is set up, especially if you go through, if you include falsification, which most scientists now say is a thing, like falsifiability of

your hypothesis means that you have a real scientific hypothesis there. If it can be disproven by some observation or some measurement or whatever, then it's falsifiable. And if it's not falsifiable, then it's not really science. So the thing is, force something to be falsifiable. And it was actually a philosopher that came up with the concept of falsification, a guy named Karl Popper in the 1930s. And he was the one that said like you have to be able to falsify something for it to

be disproven or supported. And if not, then it's pseudoscience. Well part and parcel of that is that what you're saying has to be able to be detected empirically. There's some way that has to, the presence of it has to be measured or inferred. And so a lot of people say, well, then with the scientific method, it reaches the limits of its current usefulness when it tries to explain the supernatural. When somebody says like...

Ghosts are real. Exactly. You can't prove that. But you also can't disprove it either. And so if you are a scientist who says because the scientific method can't prove or disprove the existence of ghosts or God, there is no such thing as ghosts or God, you're making a leap of faith just as much as the same person who says science can't prove or disprove the existence of ghosts or God.

Therefore, gods and ghosts are real. They're both leaps of faith and that really the most scientific approach to the existence of the supernatural, whether it is ghost or God, is that we simply don't know and that we cannot know scientifically. But that doesn't mean that it does exist or doesn't exist. And that saying that science shows that it does or doesn't exist is by definition the opposite of what science shows. Science shows neither.

It's not capable of showing or showing that something doesn't exist. Yeah. That's a good point. The other place where science can get corrupted is when it blurs the lines or when people blur the lines between moral judgments and science value judgments. You can study global warming. You can study cause and effect. You can report data.

But when you make that secondly to say, and this is a scientist, I mean someone can come along and say global warming is bad, shouldn't drive your SUV, that's fine. But a scientist can't do a study and say that because that's a value judgment and that's where science can get corrupted pretty much. You can study global warming and results until the cows come home. But you can't assert that if you use this light bulb, you're a bad person. Right. Ocean acidification is bad.

It's not good for humans, but if you're a jellyfish, it's awesome. Right. So yes, again, you made a great point. It's not science. It's people using science to make value judgments. So ultimately, the scientific method, although it does have its limitations in that it needs empirical data to prove or disprove something, it's not flawed. That's not a flaw.

That's a limitation. And it's when it's misused, then its results become flawed or skewed. And that's the people doing it, man, not science. That's right. It's pretty interesting stuff. Yeah. Man, this is a good one. I thought so too, man.

Way to start out with a bang. Boom. It's all downhill from here. If you want to know more about the scientific method, check out that article on The Economist, check out Explorables, and then of course check out the scientific method in the search bar at HowStuffWorks.com. And since I said that, it's time for Listener Mail. That's right.

But quickly, before Listener Mail, we get asked by listeners all the time, what can we do since you have a free podcast, we can't pay for it, what can we do to help you guys? And one thing you can do that we would appreciate is go to iTunes and leave a rating and a review for us. Yeah. That makes a big, big difference in keeping us up there in the rankings, which means more people find stuff you should know. After they listen to Serial, they'll just say, well, geez, there's other podcasts in

the world. What is this podcast? So ratings and reviews really help us out, and it doesn't cost you anything but a few minutes. Be honest, we're not saying go leave us some great review, but go leave us a great review. You said it. And tell one person about stuff you should know. We would appreciate that too.

Send somebody on to the show, and that's it, that's our version of a pledge drive. Wow. We do that once every three years now. Not very obnoxious. And it lasts 40 seconds. All right. So on to Listener Mail. This is from my sister-in-law, actually.

Oh, yeah. That's some nepotism. Yeah. Jenny Bryant, she mentioned in the homeschool episode, homeschooled her kids for a little while. And she sort of corrected me. One of the homeschooling episodes, guys, one very big trend these days in the homeschooling community is what Abby, my niece, does, which is hybrid homeschooling.

So two to three days a week, she is at school, and then the rest of the time she's at home. She's a plant. She's not a plant. The rest of the time she's at home. So she says it's a great option with curriculum provided and new topics sought at school and then worked out at home. Many of these schools are accredited, making, getting into college, including Ivy League schools, hassle-free.

Nice. And Abby's school has sports teams, homecoming, Abby's actually an excellent volleyball player. Yeah. Beta Club, newspaper staff, all the good stuff. The flexibility is great for families, and we are huge fans of how the hybrid approach prepares students for college by allowing them time outside of class to manage their work and life schedules. So that's from Jenny.

Nice. Thanks, Jenny. Oh, really? First listener mail via text. How did you print that out? Did you retype it and print it? No, dude. Are you serious?

You can print from text? No. You just copy-pasted it to an email. Oh, yeah, yeah. I forgot about that, Matt. How in the world did you print a text? Did you do that with your thoughts? I have a niece who is excellent at volleyball, too.

Oh, yeah? We should get them together. I don't know. Ten, eleven, twelve? Okay. Something like that? Oh, maybe they face off against one another. Yeah.

Is she in Atlanta? Yeah, she's up in Canton. You never know. Where's Abby? She's in Roswell, but they, I think, with volleyball, they kind of have played all over the state. That'd be bizarre if they played each other. Yeah.

We'll just see each other at a match one day on opposite sides of the court with our arms folded. Yeah. What else? I got nothing else. Well, like Chuck said, go leave us a review, and if you want to get in touch with us, you can tweet to us at S-Y-S-K podcast. You can join us on facebook.com slash stuff you should know.

You can email us. Did we still do that? Yeah, you can't text me. At stuffpodcast.howstuffworks.com. And as always, join us at our home on the web, stuffyoushouldknow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. I'm Munga Shatikular, and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to believe.

You can find it in major league baseball, international banks, K-pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me. And my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes, because I think your ideas are about to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your

podcasts. Attention Bachelor Nation. He's back. The host of some of America's most dramatic TV moments returns with the most dramatic podcast ever with Chris Harrison. During two decades in reality TV, Chris saw it all. And now he's telling all. It's going to be difficult at times.

It'll be funny. We'll push the envelope. We have a lot to talk about. Listen to the most dramatic podcast ever with Chris Harrison on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.